Amazon web services suffer major outage

Update 12:26pm: Amazon's web hosting services are all back online, the company has said.

Original story: Many popular websites have gone down as a result of Amazon's hosting service suffering a serious outage in North Virginia, USA.

Sites affected include Reddit, Minecraft, and Foursquare.

The outage is due to an issue that is preventing those and other websites from accessing data from Amazon's Elastic Block Storage system. It started as a minor issue affecting performance at about 5:30am New Zealand time, but had escalated into a full-blown outage by about 8am.

While Amazon has said that only a "limited number" of EBS volumes are down, users of the service are reporting total blackouts of their volumes.

Amazon suffered a similar outage in June when severe storms took down power lines, cutting off the North Virginia data centre's electricity supply.